Hi,

some people here obviously already tried it. I cannot (only one system without
a CD writer) and have some questions:

First: is it possible to try it in something like VirtualBox?

The KDE people tell about lots of features but leave a lot unclear. Like
Phonon can reroute audio in a central way. However, does that require that
applications actually use Phonon for audio, then?

I am missing a overview over the state of applications: which ones are already
KDE4 ready (completely, I mean) and which ones are hopelessly left behind and
still at KDE3?

I can still run KDE3 applications on a KDE4 desktop but what happens to
KDE3-desktop things like system sounds for such applications (arts is
probably not staying around). Is dcop compatible with the new d-bus stuff?

Thanks

HS


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El Martes, 15 de Enero de 2008, Hendrik Sattler escribió:
> Hi,
>
> some people here obviously already tried it. I cannot (only one system
> without a CD writer) and have some questions:
>
> First: is it possible to try it in something like VirtualBox?

I'm not sure about VirtualBox, but my bet is yes. I've tried live cds with
qemu, and they run normally.

However, I don't understand why you say that you cannot try it. There are
plenty of ways to do it, without using a live CD at all:

* You can install the packages from experimental, if you use unstable.
* If you don't use unstable, you can install unstable in a chroot, and there
install the experimental packages.
* You can compile KDE, or the parts you want, from source. It requires time,
sure, but is pretty straightforward, specially since the move to cmake. And
if you compile from the 4.0 branch, you can very easily get updates.

There are other possibilities, like logging in to a NX server with 4.0
installed, although I'm not sure if there are yet public NX servers with 4.0
(there were during the 3.x series).

> The KDE people tell about lots of features but leave a lot unclear. Like
> Phonon can reroute audio in a central way. However, does that require that
> applications actually use Phonon for audio, then?

Sorry, I don't know this.

> I am missing a overview over the state of applications: which ones are
> already KDE4 ready (completely, I mean) and which ones are hopelessly left
> behind and still at KDE3?

Well, its easy as that: there is no KDE PIM nor KOffice. The rest of the
modules (multimedia, graphics, games, edu, etc.) are fully ported, and have a
KDE 4 version. What is not included here, is applications in extragear (e.g.,
amarok or k3b). Extragear apps have separate release schedules. I've read
that kplayer was ported, but I don't know about other applications.

> I can still run KDE3 applications on a KDE4 desktop but what happens to
> KDE3-desktop things like system sounds for such applications (arts is
> probably not staying around). Is dcop compatible with the new d-bus stuff?

I guess that arts will be running inside a KDE 4 session just fine, as the
rest of KDE 3 services that also need to be running, and that normally one
doesn't see, or is aware of their existence.

DCOP and DBUS are not compatible, and I remember threads in kde-core-devel
that discussed ways of making the apps partly backward compatible. But I
guess that was filled in the "cool, but not 100% needed/possible" category.

--
Alex (a.k.a. suy) - GPG ID 0x0B8B0BC2
http://barnacity.net/ - Jabber ID: suy@bulmalug.net

Am Dienstag 15 Januar 2008 schrieb Hendrik Sattler:
> Hi,

Hi Hendrik,

> some people here obviously already tried it. I cannot (only one system
> without a CD writer) and have some questions:
>
> First: is it possible to try it in something like VirtualBox?

I have it in virtualbox. Works pretty nice. You can't fully test
compositing easily at least with OpenGL tough, it won't obviously not
hardware accelerated.

One issue I have it that antialiasing does not appear to work in KDE 4, no
matter what I set in System Settings/Appearance. It works in a XFCE
environment that I installed as recovery GUI in case I break KDE 4 at
some time.

Ciao,
--
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7

>>>>> "Martin" == Martin Steigerwald <Martin@lichtvoll.de> writes:


Martin> I have it in virtualbox. Works pretty nice. You can't
Martin> fully test compositing easily at least with OpenGL tough,
Martin> it won't obviously not hardware accelerated.


Hi Martin;

Could you give as a few details about what you did to get kde4 running
on virtualbox?

Thanks,

David


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Am Dienstag 15 Januar 2008 schrieb David Bremner:
> >>>>> "Martin" == Martin Steigerwald <Martin@lichtvoll.de> writes:
>
> Martin> I have it in virtualbox. Works pretty nice. You can't
> Martin> fully test compositing easily at least with OpenGL tough,
> Martin> it won't obviously not hardware accelerated.
>
>
> Hi Martin;

Hi David,

> Could you give as a few details about what you did to get kde4 running
> on virtualbox?

I installed etch from the net installer without any tasks, cause I
couldn't download a lenny/sid installer at that day (torrents broken and
what not, somehow I just didn't found a working URL), upgraded to sid,
then installed KDE 3.5 and then installed KDE 4 experimental, so that I
have everything from KDE 4 and anything from KDE 3 that remains (for
example kdepim). I also installed 2.6.23 kernel, but that shouldn't
matter. Had some strange problems with xorg, it didn't generate a
suitable xorg.conf initially, so I copied over my laptop one.

You need to have experimental in the sources.list of course. Since
experimental by default has a low priority aptitude won't automatically
update KDE 4 packages. I use the following to get to know what KDE
packages I need to update:

apt-show-versions | egrep "(kde|plasma|extragear)" | grep -v uptodate

(you need the debian package apt-show-versions for that too work)

I basically have these packages installed:

kde4debian:/etc/default/kdm.d# apt-show-versions | egrep "(kde|plasma|
extragear)" | sort
extragear-plasma-data/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-1
extragear-plasma/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-1
kdeadmin/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-1
kdebase-bin/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-1
kdebase-data/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-1
kdebase/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-1
kdebase-kio-plugins/experimental uptodate 4:3.96.0-1
kdebase-runtime-bin-kde4/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-1
kdebase-runtime-data-common/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-1
kdebase-runtime-data/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-1
kdebase-runtime/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-1
kdebase-workspace-bin/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-2
kdebase-workspace-data/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-2
kdebase-workspace/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-2
kdeedu/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-1
kdegames-card-data/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-1
kdegames/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-1
kdegames-mahjongg-data/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-1
kdegraphics/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-1
kdegraphics-strigi-plugins/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-1
kde-icons-oxygen/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-1
kde-l10n-de/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-1
kdelibs4c2a/sid uptodate 4:3.5.8.dfsg.1-6
kdelibs5-data/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-1
kdelibs5/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-1
kdelibs-bin/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-1
kdelibs-data/sid uptodate 4:3.5.8.dfsg.1-6
kdemultimedia/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-1
kdemultimedia-kio-plugins/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-1
kdenetwork/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-1
kdenetwork-filesharing/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-1
kdepasswd/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-1
kdepim-kfile-plugins/sid uptodate 4:3.5.8-1
kdepim-kio-plugins/sid uptodate 4:3.5.8-1
kdepim-kresources/sid uptodate 4:3.5.8-1
kdepimlibs5/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-1
kdepimlibs-data/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-1
kdepim/sid uptodate 4:3.5.8-1
kdepim-wizards/sid uptodate 4:3.5.8-1
kdessh/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-1
kdeutils/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-1
libkdeedu4/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-1
libkdegames4/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-1
libkdepim1a/sid uptodate 4:3.5.8-1
liblockdev1/sid uptodate 1.0.3-1.2
libplasma1/experimental uptodate 4:4.0.0-2

I hope thats complete. Maybe I am missing something.

For kdm from KDE 4 to work correctly I needed to disable the debian theme:

kde4debian:/etc/default/kdm.d# cat 10_desktop-base
USETHEME="false"
THEME="/usr/share/apps/kdm/themes/debian-moreblue"
WALLPAPER="/usr/share/apps/kdm/themes/debian-moreblue/background.svg"

I also installed the virtualbox guest additions, I used the ISO that you
can mount into the VM via the menu. This also replaced the graphics and
mouse driver with VirtualBox ones. So for example mouse pointer does not
get locked inside the VM window. There are Debian packages for guest
additions in the meanwhile tough.

Well I could upload the image somewhere, there is nothing private in
there, but its already about 2.3 GB... I could try to compact it via
vboxmanage and 7zip or something to see how big it would be. To host it
on my or one of the companies server I would need to ask first,
tough ;-).

Ciao,
--
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7


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El Martes, 15 de Enero de 2008, Alejandro Exojo escribió:
> El Martes, 15 de Enero de 2008, Hendrik Sattler escribió:
>
> > I am missing a overview over the state of applications: which ones are
> > already KDE4 ready (completely, I mean) and which ones are hopelessly
> > left behind and still at KDE3?
>
> Well, its easy as that: there is no KDE PIM nor KOffice. The rest of the
> modules (multimedia, graphics, games, edu, etc.) are fully ported, and have
> a KDE 4 version. What is not included here, is applications in extragear
> (e.g., amarok or k3b). Extragear apps have separate release schedules. I've
> read that kplayer was ported, but I don't know about other applications.
>

Just to note, gwenview is ported, but I think this now belongs to
kdegraphics. If you want to know about the rest maybe going to its web and
checking out could be the best method.

Altough it's not usable yet, you could also try koffice alpha (1.9.96) which
is also present on experimental.

Regards,
--
Raúl Sánchez Siles
----->Proud Debian user<-----
Linux registered user #416098

El Martes, 15 de Enero de 2008, Martin Steigerwald escribió:
> Am Dienstag 15 Januar 2008 schrieb Hendrik Sattler:
> > Hi,
>
> Hi Hendrik,
>
> > some people here obviously already tried it. I cannot (only one system
> > without a CD writer) and have some questions:
> >
> > First: is it possible to try it in something like VirtualBox?
>
> I have it in virtualbox. Works pretty nice. You can't fully test
> compositing easily at least with OpenGL tough, it won't obviously not
> hardware accelerated.
>

I think the closer way to the real thing(TM) for using kde4 and keeping your
kde3 installation untouched is creating a chroot. Well it is not as close as
running a whole kde4 installation or a kde4 livecd but it allows you to test
it thouroughfully and this includes opengl effects.

This is the way I chose, I created an unstable chroot and configured the
kde3 kdm to run on display :1, while kde4 kdm will run on :0. This is because
I can only run one xorg instance with opengl acceleration.

I also use a test user for kde4 while my original debian-kde installation is
untouched. These are some indications I went through to get this working.

1- create a chroot using debootstrap on /home/chroot/experimental
2- configure schroot to use that installation and also mount /tmp and /home
(into chroot)
3- add the experimental repository to the chroot
4- apt-pin experimental packages with higher priority than unstable
5- install kdebase, kdemultimedia, kdeutils, kdegraphics, kdenetwork and
kde-l10n-es
6- tweak the xorg configuration file to enable composite and dri.
(into original installation)
7- change kde3 kdm configuration to reserve :1 instead of :0
8- create a test user and add it to audio group.

Now each time you want to enter kde4:

1- Go to a text terminal
2- stop kde3 kdm
3- enter into the chroot
4- start kde4 kdm
5- Logon as test user
6- Go to another text terminal
7- Start kde3 kdm
8- Logon as regular user.

This last steps could be cumbersome, but it could be automated using
scripts.

I planned to write a good explanation on the debian wiki, but I haven't
found the time yet.

More info on request.

Regards,
--
Raúl Sánchez Siles
----->Proud Debian user<-----
Linux registered user #416098

Am Donnerstag 17 Januar 2008 schrieb Raúl Sánchez Siles:
> El Martes, 15 de Enero de 2008, Martin Steigerwald escribió:
> > Am Dienstag 15 Januar 2008 schrieb Hendrik Sattler:
> > > Hi,
> >
> > Hi Hendrik,
> >
> > > some people here obviously already tried it. I cannot (only one
> > > system without a CD writer) and have some questions:
> > >
> > > First: is it possible to try it in something like VirtualBox?
> >
> > I have it in virtualbox. Works pretty nice. You can't fully test
> > compositing easily at least with OpenGL tough, it won't obviously not
> > hardware accelerated.
>
> I think the closer way to the real thing(TM) for using kde4 and
> keeping your kde3 installation untouched is creating a chroot. Well it
> is not as close as running a whole kde4 installation or a kde4 livecd
> but it allows you to test it thouroughfully and this includes opengl
> effects.
>
> This is the way I chose, I created an unstable chroot and configured
> the kde3 kdm to run on display :1, while kde4 kdm will run on :0. This
> is because I can only run one xorg instance with opengl acceleration.

Sounds interesting. Especially as I can test KDE 4 with OpenGL then. And
bind mount my home directory into KDE4 chroot, rsync ~/.kde to ~/.kde4 to
see what KDE4 makes out of my KDE 3 configuration . Not without backup
of cause.

--
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7

Am Dienstag 15 Januar 2008 schrieb Martin Steigerwald:
> Am Dienstag 15 Januar 2008 schrieb Hendrik Sattler:
> > Hi,
>
> Hi Hendrik,
>
> > some people here obviously already tried it. I cannot (only one
> > system without a CD writer) and have some questions:
> >
> > First: is it possible to try it in something like VirtualBox?
>
> I have it in virtualbox. Works pretty nice. You can't fully test
> compositing easily at least with OpenGL tough, it won't obviously not
> hardware accelerated.
>
> One issue I have it that antialiasing does not appear to work in KDE 4,
> no matter what I set in System Settings/Appearance. It works in a XFCE
> environment that I installed as recovery GUI in case I break KDE 4 at
> some time.

This has been mentioned by Michael Biebl before and more detailed in
debian-user-german

Its a but in fontconfig 2.5 [1].
As workaround downgrade to fontconfig 2.4 [2]. Remember to also downgrade
libfontconfig1

Now my KDE 4 is nice and shiny. XRender compositing works quite nicely.
OpenGL does not work. I tried it, was to slow to be usable with software
rendering and it seems the kwin actually disabled it automatically again,
cause I couldn't click "Yes I want that" within 10 seconds ;-)

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=448494
[2] deb http://snapshot.debian.net/archive pool fontconfig

--
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7